This is quite possibly the most beautiful astronomy picture that I have seen in a very long time. Bad Astronomy queued me to Dr. Travis Rector’s Astrophotography Digital site. Dr. Rector has several phenomenal images in his gallery. He captures most of them with the MOSAIC instrument at the The National Science Foundation’s 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. (I had a chance to visit Kitt Peak while living in Tucson, AZ. Unfortunately, it was cloudy the night we went up and we never got back up for an observing session.) The MOSAIC-I CCD camera is 8192 x 8192 pixels by 16 bits. This image had an exposure time of 25 minutes in each of 3 filters. That would be a whopping 402 MB for the raw image (and 75 minutes of exposure time!) If you are similarly inspired, you can download a 113 MB TIFF image from Dr. Rector’s site on the NOAO space.
T.A.Rector and B.A.Wolpa/NOAO/AURA/NSF
